A couple of years ago, when Panasonic launched their P2 solid-state product (or more specifically the HVX-200 recorder using the technology) I posted on my site about it, and expressed a lot of skepticism from my perspective as an editor working largely in reality and documentary, about it’s viability for all but a few productions. My criticism was mainly to do with the cost of the media (around NZ$6,000) and size (4GB) of the available media at the time. Shooting at 1080i, a 4GB P2 card holds only 4 minutes of footage.

Yesterday I attended a seminar hosted by Panasonic and presented by Barry Green (of DVXUser.com) about P2 and solid-state workflows. Panasonic’s Rick Haywood pitched Barry’s seminars by saying “[Barry's] seminars are ‘fiercely independent’ and deliberately don’t toe the party line for Panasonic.” While I don’t doubt that Barry is independent, he is still, for want of a better term, a Panasonic Fanboy. The seminar was hardly independent, with many negative remarks about Sony’s products. But it was not without merit of course. Barry is very well informed about the products and workflow, but it felt that he comes at it very much from a drama perspective, but a lot of the work in New Zealand is documentary and reality TV, and often of low budgets, where the capital expenditure on P2 cards is hard to justify and where downloading from cards every half hour or so may be impractical.

The workflow suggested by Barry was to either edit directly from the cards (a handy and time saving technique for news, TVC, or even short film perhaps) or copy to hard drive and edit from that. Then archive the edited material after delivery. This makes me very uncomfortable, as I can’t help but think back on two projects I’ve worked on in the past where drive issues have resulted in lost media very close to deadline. In both cases the project could be recovered by restoring the media from tapes. Something that simply wouldn’t be possible with this workflow. I would be very very uncomfortable working on any major project without a backup of ALL my media available at all times. In a tape-based workflow, this backup is the tapes. In a P2 workflow this backup has to be created at some point.

Another point from Barry that I had some problems with was that with a non-linear acquisition format (P2, or XDCAM, or Editcam, or whatever) is that you can use space efficiently by deleting unwanted footage in the field. This is another thing that, as an editor, I am very uncomfortable with. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve found vital moments in what at first glance may appear to be useless shots. The camera op in the field doesn’t always have the perspective that the editor has later on, and by making that decision they are effectively limiting the options of the editor. I read an article years ago about digital photography saying, essentially, that many of the great photos of our time would not exist had digital photography existed, as many may have been deleted, in the field, by the photographers who had not realised the significance of the shot at the time. Often it’s not until you get out of the field and look it all over that you really see what you have.

While I agree that non-linear acquisition is probably the future, I think that Panasonic is still not quite on the right track. P2 cards are very expensive (especially given the base price of the flash memory they are based upon). There is basically still no path from P2 into a tape-based workflow (the likes of discreet Inferno and Flame are still largely tape-centric) which, while perhaps on the way out, for most post facilities the tape-path is still the best supported. I’d like to see Panasonic come out with a deck that would play DVCProHD tapes, hold 4 P2 cards and had an internal drive. This deck, in my imagining, would allow you do play P2 cards into a tape-based workflow as if they were tapes, would allow computer access to them, would allow copying to the drive (and playback from that drive) and would allow bit-for-bit copying to DVCProHD tapes from cards or drive. By offering a multifunction deck like this, the transition to P2 could be eased for many post production houses, and other large producers.

I like P2 in general, and I’m a big fan of Panasonic’s DVCProHD, but I think there a still many problems with the workflow for many people, and these problems are being minimalised and trivialised by Panasonic and it’s P2 advocates.